Women in Chemistry: Elsa Reichmanis

Elsa Reichmanis

Elsa Reichmanis became fascinated by chemistry in high school. Today she directs much of Bell Lab’s chemical research.

Reichmanis devised high-tech chemicals that let manufacturers create ever-smaller parts in computer chips, making each chip more powerful. In 1985 a personal computer’s microprocessor had 275,000 transistors in it. In 2000 the number of transistors on a similarly sized chip was 42 million.

Chips are built on thin silicon wafers that are coated with a chemical called a "resist." Reichmanis helped develop today’s high-tech resists. The patterns of chips are printed on wafers by projecting the pattern onto the resist. The resist captures the pattern like photographic paper grabs a picture. Chemical washes remove unwanted material from the wafer, leaving the desired pattern and producing the chips. (See Built on Sand.)

Courtesy Elsa Reichmanis.

"Without chemistry there wouldn't be a semiconductor industry. If you look at semiconductor manufacturing facilities, every single step . . . is a chemical step."

About Her Life

Elsa Reichmanis was born in Australia in 1953. Her parents, Peteris and Nina Reichmanis, were native Latvians who fled to Germany after World War II to escape Soviet rule in their home country. In 1946 they immigrated to Australia, where they began their family. Their first daughter, Maria, was born in 1949; Elsa followed four years later. They finally left Australia in 1962 for Syracuse, New York, to join other family members who had fled Latvia and settled in the United States.

Education was important to Elsa’s parents, who made sure she kept up with her studies, even during the long sea voyage from Australia to the United States. She was a good student, especially in science and math. After finishing high school early, at the age of 15, Reichmanis attended Syracuse University, earning a bachelor's degree and enrolling in graduate school. Organic chemistry was her chosen field, and she was fascinated by the idea of being able to design and build molecules from atoms. At 22, she graduated from Syracuse with her Ph.D.

Reichmanis stayed on at Syracuse for postdoctoral work, during which time she met Frank Purcell, whom she later married. She eventually left upstate New York for AT&T Bell Labs, now Lucent Bell Labs, in New Jersey, where she is currently director of materials research. At Bell Labs, she has carried out important work with photoresists that has enabled the semiconductor industry to make computer chips ever smaller and faster.

Reichmanis has earned several patents and is the recipient of several awards, including the Society of Chemical Industry’s 2001 Perkin Medal and the 1999 ACS Award in Applied Polymer Science. She was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 1995 and served as president of the American Chemical Society in 2003.

For Further Reading on the Web

"Elsa Reichmanis: Doing Science that Matters," — profile from the Bell Labs Web site.

"Bell Labs to Collaborate on Flexible Displays," — 2002 story about cutting-edge research from Reichmanis and other Bell Labs researchers, from the Lucent Technologies Web site.

Reichmanis, Elsa. Oral history interview by David Brock, 1 August 2001. Interview 0222, Chemical Heritage Foundation Oral History Collection, Philadelphia. Abstract, table of contents, and biographical information available online.

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